Comment by danShumway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danShumway | Hacker News Reader

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> As usual here, this post sympathetic to Republicans is immediately downvoted through the floor. It is still technically here, just grayed out and downranked to the bottom of the feed.

> I think this is similar to much of the censorship we've seen.

That's... not a particularly convincing argument though, if you are really saying that the two situations are similar. Because the downvotes this comment got came from users, not big tech. The community decided for whatever reason, good or bad, fair or biased, that they didn't like the post.

So whats your alternative to that? If I tell my friends not to eat at a restaurant and their Yelp rating plummets and they're not the first result anymore, is that censorship?

Is the implication here that communities shouldn't be able to organize their own content? Because if that's really what you mean by big tech censorship, then I'm going to have a really hard time getting on board with that. The whole point of the marketplace of ideas is that some ideas in a community win, and that other ideas become unpopular.

I would think HN would be exactly what Conservatives want. Your post eventually gets hidden if enough people in the community dislike it, but people can still get to your ideas and upvote them or vouch for them if you genuinely have community support. And doing things like scraping the site or building a competitor is much easier than with larger tech sites, HN is big but it doesn't encompass the entire tech industry. It's a little difficult for me to imagine an alternative system. Is it censorship if somebody dislikes a Youtube video, or subscribes to a channel that isn't mine? Is it censorship if I search for a video and Youtube shows me the video with the most likes first?

I'm all on board for increasing market competition and making safe spaces for communities so they aren't drowned out, I can get behind a criticism that consolidation and having one all-encompassing space where a certain group is constantly blocked out is bad. But that's a very different proposal than "it's censorship that I got downvoted."

I got hit by the comment rate limiter earlier.

I agree that downvoting someone on HN is not censorship.

What I meant is the biases of the people writing and training the ranking / flagging algorithms bleeds through into the implementation. Similar to how there have been stories that facial recognition tools only recognize white people.

I don't know that it's a great argument or analogy. I mainly was trying to point out that when you escalate from individuals downranking items to individuals writing algorithms that have similar built in biases, then you end up with something very near censorship, even if it isn't intentional.

I believe that's really the whole argument behind "system discrimination", maybe individuals aren't overtly discrimination, but the system is built up in such a way that the result is discrimination.

You can agree or not, but it's worth considering, and I'd guess most people could be convinced of it in one context or another.

Oh definitely, systemic bias in general is a thing, and I think that as certain industries get more insular there are more opportunities for that to happen, whether it's intentional or not. Tech is not immune to that, socially or politically.

But the idea of "communities shouldn't moderate themselves", or what the GOP is proposing, which is that the government should decide how communities are allowed to moderate themselves -- that is in my opinion is just really contrary to the ideal of free speech. I think that there's a risk of confusing the dangers of disproportionate and centralized power (which is a real problem) with the idea of moderation or criticism or freedom of association in general, which are themselves fundamental parts of free speech.

So I just think that we need to be very careful and precise about exactly what is meant by a claim that companies like Facebook or Visa are threats to free speech. I do encourage people and communities to try and examine their unconscious bias and how that affects the systems that they build, I think that's important for everyone to do. But the proposals that are coming out of the GOP are doing a lot more than that, there's a difference between examining bias and direct intervention into how platforms are allowed to moderate.

Would you consider the greying out and eventual hiding of comments to be censorship? Because then it's not apparent and obvious that the content is there.

No, I don't think so, for the same reason that I don't think it's a violation of free speech or something if I kick someone out of my Discord channel.

In fact, it's better than the Discord channel situation, because HN rankings aren't only not determined by a single moderator (votes reflect the people who are on HN and voting at any given moment), you can also still get to the content and post, it's just not by-default visible or promoted.

It's censorship in the most technical sense of the word, we are technically repressing someone's voice in a community, but the 1st Amendment guarantees communities and individuals a right to censor through their freedom of association, and downvoting and hiding comments is probably one the least extreme examples of that I can think of.

This only becomes a problem with market domination.

It's not a problem that Google puts some search results on the 1st page and some on the 2nd, even though most people don't click through to the 2nd page or even think about the fact that it exists. There's literally no other way to do search. It's only a problem because Google controls 90% of the search market.

> The whole point of the marketplace of ideas is that some ideas in a community win, and that other ideas become unpopular.

And the English Internet includes a large number of users from Europe/Canada in addition to the users from liberal US cities. Sites like HN with a long-form discussion format are also going to skew the demographics further along those lines. It's not a marketplace that's going to value right-wing ideas; a majority of users will have a cultural background that finds them distasteful.

Exactly. And even if there are worldwide users, it's still a community, it's still its own insulated market of ideas.

I don't think there's anything about free speech that says that only Americans should be able to form communities with each other, or that communities should be restricted to a single continent.

This would be a problem if HN dominated the entire industry and it was the only place to talk about tech, but... it's not. It's just not the same concern as talking about something like Youtube, where not only is Youtube extremely dominant, it's also hard to integrate with and hard to replicate because of high hosting costs. Heck, HN is one of the best places to build organic direct contacts with people. It's one of the few places online where if you have a popular site, you will get asked about direct RSS feeds, you will occasionally get direct emails from people. So I just don't get the analogy people draw between HN and, say, Facebook. I can't even read most business listings on FB without an account, it's entirely different beast to compete with.

I don't see any problem with a community of tech people worldwide having a site where they talk about tech, and part of that is always going to be that the people who use HN end up skewing in certain directions. There's no such thing as a neutral community, there are always predominant ideas, and there are always ideas that the community will find distasteful.

You can argue whether HN's specific biases are good, I think some of them are quite harmful, and I'm sometimes upset at the way this community skews on multiple issues. But I don't think it's a risk to free speech that those biases exist.

I agree that biases in communities aren't inherently a free speech issue. I was just making an observation. It's human nature to assume your cultural assumptions are the norm, and it can be jarring when you're a part of a community that doesn't share some of them. But that by itself doesn't mean there's systematic oppression.

Yeah, sorry. I'm not correcting anything you said, I agree with you. Just expanding. I think the way I wrote this it sounded more like an argument than I meant it to.

There are spaces I'm a part of that consider HN to be basically Right-wing, and there are a few spaces I encounter that consider it to be Left-wing. It just comes down to what those communities consider to be normal, it's expected that different communities have different standards of what is and isn't objectionable to say.

the downvotes this comment got came from users, not big tech

Users on a website meant specifically for tech workers?

Isn't that a bit like saying tech censorship doesn't come from big tech, just from the individual feelings of its employees?

Is the implication here that communities shouldn't be able to organize their own content?

Deleting and hiding any non-left wing view is not "organizing".

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